Leading with a Limp: Turning Your Struggles into Strengths

A LEADERSHIP CONFESSION

Flight Is the Only Sane Response

Idon’t pet stray dogs. I was bitten on the hand when I was six. I recall
watching this immaculately coiffed collie bound out of a neighbor’s yard
to greet me. Its elegant, effortless movement mesmerized me. I put my hand
out and, in a split second, went from being a dog lover to a child wounded in
hand and heart. Since that day I’ve never fully trusted a foreign pooch. I am
dog scarred—a tad suspicious, but still open to man’s best friend.

The same is true in my approach to leaders known as pastors. I seldom
pet a strange or even a well-known pastor. This came about after I was bitten
at age twenty-six. As a lowly intern in a local church, I was earning a whopping
fifty dollars a week for services that included leading a Bible study, visiting
church members, and walking the senior pastor’s dog. I worked with the
pastor for more than a year, and after I graduated from seminary, I came back
as an assistant pastor.

The senior pastor and I often played tennis together, and after one afternoon
match, we sat and talked about some of the things he wanted me to
tackle in the coming year. He was my mentor, and I was his apt disciple. But
it is also true that even though I had graduated from a fine seminary, I had the
maturity of a street kid who had barely escaped death, jail, and excessive brain
damage due to illicit drugs, and I had little idea how to function in the business
of organized religion. The church was as foreign to me as the Junior
League.

I was grateful beyond words to have a job and a future with this man and
his church. We left the tennis court at five o’clock and reconvened in an elders’
meeting at six. An hour into the meeting, the senior pastor said to the leaders
of our church, “I’ve come to the decision that it is best for Dan and the church
to part ways.” He offered no explanation. It was a clean, simple bite. Several
of the elders felt the decision was abrupt and without due diligence, so I kept
my job for another eighteen months. But the handwriting was on the wall.

Leaders are dangerous. They can bite without provocation, or at least
without logic, and it is best to stay out of their way or you’ll have to deal with
the consequences. Leaders can seem capricious, aloof, narcissistic, and selfinterested.

I wanted little to do with their world, so I left the complex world
of church politics and the rough-and-tumble culture of leadership to work on
my doctorate. But I didn’t escape political turmoil.

The academic realm involves politics similar to the clan warfare of early
marauding tribes. It is all about loyalty—allegiance to the tartan, flag, and set
of convictions that mark your community as unique. If you can wield a
broadax or sword well enough and speak the language of the clan, your position
is secure until death. This is called tenure. I entered the clan convinced
that I would never again lead any group, community, church, school, or sports
team as long as I lived. In fact, one of the great advantages of being an academic
was that I was expected to complain about the administration, but I didn’t
have to take on any leadership responsibilities beyond teaching my classes.

Umpteen years later, six colleagues and I wrestled with the decision of
whether to apply for accreditation for the graduate school we had haphazardly
started in Seattle. We were in a quandary: The school that had allowed us to
be a branch campus no longer wanted us. If we chose to disband, we would
face humiliation as well as the possibility of lawsuits stemming from the
school’s inability to fulfill its promise of offering degrees. We decided to apply
for accreditation. The application required the signature of the school’s presi-
dent—a position we had never discussed. We really didn’t think we needed a
president because we planned to operate as a nonhierarchical guild of peers
without a central, decision-making figure. We would be a community, not an
organization.

When the moment came for the president to sign the application, all
heads in the room dropped, including my own. An awkward half minute
ensued, and I looked up. Someone noticed my movement and said, “You are
the oldest and the best known.” I said, “Okay, but you all know I’m not really
the president.” Everyone laughed. It was as obvious as a scream in the ear: I’d
take the title, and we would all share the power and responsibility.

The dream of a nonhierarchical community of peers collapsed under conflicting
expectations, bruised feelings, immorality, and—thank God—a board
that intervened and began naming failures upon failures, and called us to
become an organization and leaders. We’ve been in the process for six years,
and I am still president. I don’t deserve to be. Perhaps that is one of the reasons
I am still asked to serve in this capacity.

Everything I despised in other leaders I have replicated in our organization.
Many times I have acted precipitously in panic before gathering sufficient
data. Many other times I have failed to act at all. If in one circumstance
I act too slowly, it seems that I act too quickly in the next. Leadership feels like
playing the slot machine in a casino. You put your best capital into the
machine, pull the lever, watch the wheels spin, and come up empty handed.
The question lingers: what am I doing wrong?

My colleagues and I have gone through enormous heartache and tremendous
change. We are still in the middle of profound transformation, and there
are days I wonder if I will survive to see the sun rise again. Last night I tossed
myself through a midnight aerobics workout that continued to the early side
of three o’clock in the morning. I worried, prayed, and thought about personnel
matters, finances, future hires, the school’s reputation in the community,
tensions among the faculty, and a host of other concerns that zapped my mind
like moths flying into a bug light.

No doubt every leader feels the constant and chronic weight of obstacles,
but it isn’t one problem or even a whole set that eats our lunch; it’s that each
problem requires a response that seldom resolves the issue. Instead, the response
simply creates multiple new problems. The weedlike problem seems to
have a pod stuffed with countless seeds that will be sown the moment it is
pulled, seeds that will result in a host of new weeds. And if that trouble isn’t
hard enough to swallow, the real issue is more personal—having to do with
the decisions and choices a leader must make, alone.

Few decisions are simple. In fact, simple decisions are better called choices.
Do I want to eat now or wait for my wife to get home? Do we cancel classes
when there is a foot of snow in Seattle? We make choices every day that require
little thought, have few consequences, and are completed without much need
for reflection or counsel. Leaders choose daily, but the real weight on their
shoulders lies in the need to decide.

And there are no easy decisions. To decide requires a death, a dying to a
thousand options, the putting aside of a legion of possibilities in order to
choose just one. De-cide. Homo--cide. Sui--cide. Patri--cide. The root word-
decidere means “to cut off.” All decisions cut us off, separate us from nearly
infinite options as we select just one single path. And every decision we make
earns us the favor of some and the disfavor of others.

Budgetary decisions, for instance, seldom involve equal distribution of the
finite resource we call money. The child who begins college may require most
of a family’s disposable income. As a result, the rest of the family can’t take
their summer vacation to the mountains. The decision blesses one and alienates
others.

A good leader will, in time, disappoint everyone. Leadership requires a
willingness to not be liked, in fact, a willingness to be hated. But it is impossible
to lead people who doubt you and hate you. So the constant tug is to
make the decision that is the least offensive to the greatest number and then
to align yourself with those who have the most power to sustain your position
and reputation in the organization.

Leadership is not about problems and decisions; it is a profoundly relational
enterprise that seeks to motivate people toward a vision that will require
significant change and risk on everyone’s part. Decisions are simply the doors
that leaders, as well as followers, walk through to get to the land where redemption
can be found.

FLIGHT IS THE ONLY SANE RESPONSE

There are two common stories I hear from students who come to Mars Hill
Graduate School. One group of students will say, “I didn’t want to be here. I
was working in Washington DC/Portland/Charlotte/Chicago. I loved my job,
my church, and my friends, but in a matter of months my life was turned
upside down. It felt like God spun me around, headed me west, and here I
am, not really sure why. But I am here, and I sense that this is where I am
meant to be.”

The other group will say, “I knew this is where I wanted to study. I heard
about the school through a book/a seminar/a student, and I have wanted to
be here for years. But since I’ve come, I feel like I’m going through a crisis of
confidence. I don’t know if this is really what I am supposed to do. I’m afraid,
and I feel crazy for ever thinking I wanted to come here.”

Doubt is the context for surrender. And flight is the path for obedience.
When we’re reluctant to lead, doubting ourselves and our call, we are ripe for
growth as a leader. Likewise, when we hear the call to lead but we run in the
opposite direction, God has a way of having us thrown off the boat, swallowed
by a large fish, and spit onto the shore where we are to serve. If the situation
weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious. God invites us to run and yet to know
that he will arrive at our place of flight before we arrive so he can direct our
steps again.

Perhaps you doubt this is true. Or, more likely, you hope it might be different
for you. But the data from the Bible seem to support this premise more
often than not. God seems to choose leaders who don’t want to serve, and when
they do follow God’s call, they often do so in a way that creates new chaos.

Consider each of the three patriarchs: Abraham was a liar and a coward. Isaac,
the least troubled of the three, was forced to live with the memory of his father’s
knife at his throat, and later he allowed his wife to manipulate the entire household.
Jacob was so manipulative and self-serving that he was like Pigpen in the
Peanuts comic strip, billowing chaotic dust wherever he went.

Or think about Moses. In a ridiculous encounter, God speaks to Moses
from a burning bush. Moses removes his sandals and acknowledges the place
to be holy ground, yet he second-guesses God’s command that he return to
Egypt to free his people. (No doubt Moses was recalling his first effort to free
the slaves—the murder he committed, a crime which sent him into a forty-year
exile.) Moses’ efforts to dissuade God led to a second plan that involved Aaron,
his more articulate brother. This is not the behavior we would predict of Moses
or God. It seems much closer to a script from Monty Python than Ben Hur.1

God’s habit of calling reluctant leaders gets even odder. He calls young
Jeremiah, a boy who is no more than eighteen years old. Jeremiah resists three
times and secures a promise that God will protect him. As the story unfolds,
we see that it would have been wise for Jeremiah to have pressed for a definition
of protection and then read the fine print. His life was one of inexhaustible
suffering and the absence of what most sane people would call protection.
And then there is Jonah.

Jonah is a world-class model of trying to flee the call of leadership. He
runs away on a boat and is thrown into the deep chaos of the sea only to be
swallowed by a piscine taxi that spits him onto the shore of the very place he
was trying so hard to avoid.2 Again, it is a bizarre story that makes our devotion
to formal, academic preparation for leadership seem like it was invented
on the dark side of the moon.

The kind of people God calls and their reluctant responses to that calling
are not what we expect of professional leaders. We expect our leaders to eagerly
and faithfully execute their duties. After all, they’re trained professionals.

THE FLAWED FORMAL-TRAINING PROCESS

The training process for leaders—secular or religious—can usually be broken
into three areas: content, skill, and ethics/character. At the seminary I attended,
90 percent of the curriculum was devoted to content, 10 percent focused on
skill, and our character and ethics, or how we lived in relationship with others,
was never addressed beyond a few talks in chapel. It was assumed that who
we were as people and how we related to others had been addressed prior to
our arrival at seminary.

The place for personal growth was thought to be the church, not the seminary.
The seminary trained men and women in the Bible, theology, church
history, and other academic rigors, and then it taught those who would pastor
how to preach and conduct themselves in the church. Practical skills were
assumed to be learned from classroom input and field experience. We all knew
that what mattered was how well we did on papers and tests.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, seminaries began to
admit that their students needed much more. So professors of practical theology,
who had been or were still in the “real world” of the pastorate, taught
courses and occasionally took students into the trenches. But the focus was still
about 80 percent content, 15 percent skill, and only 5 percent ethics/character,
with a course on spiritual formation thrown in for good measure.

Oddly, the same is true in many MBA and other leadership programs.
Content is king. In MBA programs, however, skills are wed more to the
curriculum than in most seminaries. Yet character is equally ignored. As more
business dishonesty and illegalities occurred and became public knowledge,
though, a cry rose to bring in ethics. The secular world has also been quicker
to include psychology and its offspring in the mix. Most MBA graduates have
studied personality profiles and data on their own work personalities. Folks
who have been trained in or who have taught in the business world tell me
that the mix is now likely 65 percent content, 30 percent skill, and 5 percent
ethics.

Notice the pattern: teach theory and skill, and hope that somehow the
issues of character and ethics will take care of themselves. The assumption is
that parents have already dealt with their children’s character issues or that the
church, synagogue, or other religious institution will take care of shaping
ethics and personal values. The academy is for content and practical skills.

This is a problem because we in academia fail to address the narcissism that
drives many leaders. We enable troubled and manipulative men and women
to devour their colleagues, their staffs, and their congregations simply because
they’ve passed exams, written papers, matriculated through a degree, and gained
the credentials to be called professionals.

THE ALTERNATIVE: GOD’S REQUIREMENT

What should we require of a pastoral candidate, a corporate CFO, or even a
representative to the state legislature? What I am about to write is ridiculous.
It won’t happen in the public and secular realms. It could possibly happen in
faith-based contexts, but it is far from the norm. Yet it is the model offered by
most of God’s leaders in the Bible.

We should bless men and women who have done their level best to escape
leadership but who have been compelled to return and put their hand on the
tiller. We should expect anyone who remains in a formal leadership context to
experience repeated bouts of flight, doubt, surrender, and return. Why would
this be God’s plan? Why does God love the reluctant leader? Here is one reason:
the reluctant leader is not easily seduced by power, pride, or ambition.

Power

A leader inevitably uses his own power, or limits the power of others, to make
things happen. And there are as many different kinds of power in an organization
as there are people, but two forms are the most common: instrumental
and influential. Think of a family. The mother and father hold the instrumental
power to control money and the family’s schedule, so they plan the
family vacation. But the volatile and moody middle child has the influential
power to ruin the vacation.

The people in an organization who can hire or fire, set budgets, determine
priorities, evaluate performance, and reward success hold the instrumental
power. The influential power might be in the hands of a famous faculty member,
a brilliant software designer, or the pastor who resigned but remains in the
congregation. It is crucial to know who holds the power to set an organization’s
direction and tone.

A reluctant leader is highly suspicious of people who work to accumulate
and hoard power. One of the reasons godly leaders are reluctant is that they
have frequently seen power misused to build personal kingdoms. I have several
friends who worked in education but were ruined by a bully school superintendent.
This individual first emptied the school board of strong voices and
then filled the empty seats with yes-men and -women who were not experienced
in educational processes. She then began to remove school principals
who questioned her authority. In one tirade she yelled at a principal, “I will
not tolerate insubordination. You will not scream at me or humiliate me in
public ever again.” The preceding interaction had been heated, but no one else
present at the meeting felt that the superintendent had been treated poorly.

This woman dealt with the school district’s multimillion-dollar debt by
cutting the programs and the positions of individuals who questioned her, and
she rewarded the few who protected and promoted her regime. And there was
nothing that the victimized teachers could do. The superintendent covered over
her violence with school administrator rhetoric. She marginalized every critic
as a miscreant. And because of her dictatorial rule, highly qualified teachers
and administrators—the ones who weren’t forced out—fled the sinking ship.

Reluctant leaders don’t aspire to hold power; in fact, they avidly work to
give it away. They attempt this even as they use power to create a context
where power is used fairly, wisely, and with checks and balances. A reluctant
leader does not hoard power because doing so creates more pressure and
demand. Power is like a weighty gold bar. It can’t be slipped into one’s wallet;
instead it must be carried obtrusively everywhere one travels. It elicits the envy
of others and many will want to take it. The reluctant leader detoxifies power
by empowering others to bring their vision, passion, and gifts to the enterprise.
She creates an environment of open debate that honors differences and where
no one fears reprisal.
In the leadership approach of a reluctant leader, it is a blessing to give away
power and a calling to monitor its faithful use.

Pride

A reluctant leader is not likely to be caught in pride’s limelight. Pride is a perverted
form of worship. Pride basks in the light of its own glory and blesses its
goodness as originating from within. Prideful people, however, never seem
secure in their self-evaluation: they require a community to idolize their glory.

Self-glory pushes prideful leaders to remind others of who they know and
what they’ve read and written, of their earned degrees and the programs they
have created. Such leaders are seldom wrong, and they always are in the know.
Pride is a sucking vortex that, vampirelike, draws into itself the goodness and
glory of others.

Such pride is contagious. Being in the presence of a pride-driven soul
begets a craving in others for more power. It is like being in a wealthy enclave
of Mercedeses, Porsches, and Bentleys when you’re driving a Ford. What once
seemed like a good car no longer feels adequate. Similarly, the presence of a
self-glorifying leader lures with a vanity fair of opportunity. Followers try to do
whatever is required to keep their personal stock high and to avoid the danger
of crossing swords with the narcissistic leader. This contagion is nearly impossible
to escape. The only way out is to flee for one’s life.

And a reluctant leader is one who has fled in the past. He knows he is a
coward and a fool. He already tried to slip away, but he got caught. He went
AWOL and, rather than being court-martialed, was advanced in rank. How
does one fathom the absurdity? So it’s no surprise that a reluctant leader is not
impressed with either his ability or the results of his labor. This quality is why
Paul underlined the type of people God calls as leaders. He said, “God chose
the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things
of the world to shame the strong.”3 Why? Because such a selection process
clarifies who deserves the glory and who is to be grateful just to have been a
part of God’s story.

A reluctant leader gets to boast in the foolishness of God. It is this wise
conundrum that sets the tone for the unique mark of biblical leadership.
When something goes well, we are not to say, “It is all of God. He gets the
praise. I was just being used by him.” That is partly true, but not true enough.
We can more rightly say, “I had a great idea, and I worked like a madman. But
left to myself I would have created a nightmare. God turned good, clean bones
into dancing flesh.” The truth is that I am pretty smart and I work very hard,
but the goodness of my creation, just like the breath of my body, is a gift. Can
I take an ounce of credit for my mind or for my capacity to endure the high
levels of boredom required to get a PhD?

A reluctant leader knows that her calling to lead is ridiculous, but she bears
the high glory of God’s decision to call weak fools into the work of leading
others. Consequently, a reluctant leader smiles at the striving ambition of
power-hungry leaders to make more and keep more.

Ambition

The ambitious leader pushes relentlessly to do more, to build a bigger organization,
and to attract more notice. Of course the reason for building something
bigger is always to do more good for the cause. We can serve more
people if we have more staff, more airtime, and more money. But enough is
never enough.

It should be clear, however, that the issue of ambition is not primarily a
matter of size. There are organizations with thousands of employees that are
not driven by ambition. Conversely, I’ve met leaders of organizations consisting
of two people who burned with the frenzy of growth. The mark of ambition
is the zeal for bigger, better, and more—no matter the cost to people or
the process. The ends justify the means because it is better to burn out than to
rust out.

Ambitious leaders sing the vision and spin the cost. Rather than acknowledging
what must be sacrificed to move from point A to point B, ambitious
leaders extol the need and the benefits of the death march. The ambitious
leader has a clean-shaven face, a stylish haircut, and a starched uniform. He
plays a military march as his soundtrack, and when anyone questions the timing
or wisdom of the plan, that person is viewed as a troglodyte or traitor.

Not so with the reluctant leader. He is more like the battle-weary master
sergeant who has trained many freshly minted West Point grads in the realities
of their craft. The reluctant leader has been to war and knows that almost nothing
justifies sending men and women into harm’s way. The reluctant leader
knows that perhaps one war out of one hundred is fought for a just cause, so
he is not caught up in the hoopla of bigger and better. He refuses to serve the
larger good by telling lies to get people involved. When new buildings need to
be built or new programs grown, the reluctant leader works hard to minimize
the cost to the constituents and looks for every possible way of utilizing space
or revising existing programs.

The reluctant leader is not looking for luxury or a large office, nor does
she invest in the makings of a kingdom. One way to identify an ambitious
kingdom builder is her refusal to plan for succession. There are countless horror
stories about leaders of Christian organizations holding on to power late
into life. Such refusal to prepare for succession in advance hamstrings the organization
from developing high-capacity leaders at lower levels. Meanwhile,
the top executive begins to see every potential leader as a rival and a threat.

Perhaps just as destructive as having no plan is the ambitious kingdom
builder who aspires for his son to inherit his throne. Seldom is the son equal
to the father, and as a result the organization becomes a shell of its former self.
There are significant exceptions, such as Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist
Billy Graham, but the notable failures are too obvious and plentiful to
mention.

The reluctant leader doesn’t merely give accolades to others. It is her true
joy to see others awaken to their potential and exceed their greatest dreams. It
is the hope of every good teacher to have students who take their work further
than the teacher was able to do. To be surpassed is the ideal. To be replaced is
the goal, not a sign of failure.

These are the hard realities of reluctant leadership. It is a calling that is ridiculous
and counterintuitive and paradoxical. And the only sane response is to
run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. If you are in fact able to escape
to a more private and quiet existence, then count it a blessing of God’s kindness.
He has decided to spare you the costly experience called leadership.

But there is another possibility. If God is real and involved in your life and
wants you to be a leader, he will corner you and direct you back into the good
that you are to live. So if God captures you, stop running, count the cost, and
lead. The more passionately a leader tries to flee but is cornered by God to
serve in leadership, the more clearly she understands that her service is an
exposure of her weakness and a revelation of God’s goodness. It is God’s design
to use reluctant servants to usher in glory.